15 Tools, Techniques and Examples to Help Cut Through the Noise

The world’s biggest brands and ideologies were built on stories. That’s no exaggeration: every major idea, from Star Wars to Apple to Western Democracy to Christianity and Islam, wouldn’t be where it is without the power of storytelling.

And in the modern world, stories are a ubiquitous marketing tool as well.

Bill Gates predicted this would happen in his “Content is King” essay back in 1997. 20 years on, blog posts – i.e. text-based stories – are the most profitable kind of content.

They’re also the most popular type of content with 2 million new blog posts released each day.

This is not only a testament to the enduring power that stories have, it is an indicator of how crowded and competitive text-based content is becoming. Although 70% of B2B marketers are planning to create more content this year than they did in 2016, only 3 in 10 of them believe they’re effective at content marketing. This is down from 38% last year – and reflective of the increasing difficulty of marketing via stories alone.

The question is, how can you do better? How can you firmly position yourself in the minority of marketers that see strong lead generation and SEO results from their content?

We believe the answer is visual storytelling.

After reading this article, you may find yourself agreeing. We’ll kick off by explaining what visual storytelling is and what it can do for your brand. Afterwards, we’ll get into specific examples, techniques, and tools you can use to create powerful, high-ROI visual stories for your brand.

What Is Visual Storytelling – and What’s in It for Your Brand?

Put simply, visual storytelling is exactly what it sounds like: real and fictional stories told through the use of images, videos, and interactive visual content.

The term itself is new. As recently as November 2008, there were virtually no Google queries for the word combination:

But while the phrase is new, visuals have always been a huge part of each and every ideology and brand we mentioned in our introduction.

From Star Wars’ Darth Vader…

To beautiful works of religious art…

To Apple’s hallmark “Big Brother” ad…

Examples of visual storytelling are everywhere. In fact, even though you may think of storytelling as primarily verbal and text-based, the fact is that the oldest recorded stories were purely visual, having predated writing by thousands of years!

Why is all of this so important to your business today?

The main reason is that in the past, only the biggest and richest organizations could afford to create and distribute visual content. As recently as 2010, something as simple as an infographic could cost thousands of dollars to produce.

The idea of creating entire stories based on visuals was a pipe dream for small and mid-sized businesses.

This has changed.

Today, there’s a variety of tools that make it dead easy to use visual storytelling for marketing purposes. Instagram alone has birthed tens Go to the full article.